By Will Stewart
Adolf Hitler was on the verge of creating an Orwellian-style cable TV system to broadcast Nazi propaganda around Germany.
Screens would have been set up in public places, including in laundries so housewives could tune in, according to a documentary based on papers and tapes found in his bunker.

Actually, don’t wait, because we’ve got to stop a bigger economic disaster in the making: 78 million baby-boomers eligible for Social Security and Medicare.
By David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General
October 30, 2008
Staring into the abyss always focuses the mind, which can help you avoid falling in. So let’s take a look at the [...]

By Adam Haigh
Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) — Stocks fell in Europe and Asia, extending the MSCI World Index’s worst monthly slump on record, as concern deepened the economic slowdown will stifle profit growth. U.S. index futures retreated.
L’Oreal SA lost 8.5 percent after the world’s biggest cosmetics company reduced its profit forecast as consumers cut purchases. [...]

By Shobhana Chandra
Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) — Spending by U.S. consumers dropped more than forecast in September, capping its weakest quarter in three decades and signaling the economy will continue to slump in coming months.
The 0.3 percent decrease in purchases was the biggest in four years and followed no change in August, the Commerce Department [...]

Kevin Phillips
The time has come to review how back in 2005-2006 George W. Bush — now increasingly perceived as another Herbert Hoover — picked two top appointees who helped steer him towards his fateful 2008 rendezvous with a second Great Crash.

Because of the global financial crisis, Barrick chief Peter Munk said the pressure on gold has been absolutely unprecedented, which may be why the gold price has yet to live up to its promise.
Dorothy Kosich
Friday , 31 Oct 2008

David Morgan
October 31, 2008
This headline should grab anyone’s attention, especially those interested in the silver market. Before going forward, let me explain that fully 70% of silver is produced as a result of mining other metals, mostly base metals. Copper mining, for example, is responsible for 28% of the silver mined in 2007. Lead/Zinc [...]

By Bill Bonner
October 31st, 2008
Everybody’s getting in line.
After the bailout of Wall Street, everybody wants cash. The automakers are at the head of the line. Auto sales fell 6% worldwide in the 3rd quarter. GM says its North American sales were worse - off 18.9% from last year. If it doesn’t get some [...]

By Graham Summers
October 30th, 2008
What a horror story.
Indeed, things took a truly horrific turn in October. Stocks staged their worst week in history. We also saw some of the largest single one-day market moves ever—both to the upside and the downside. Had the year ended on October 10, it would have been one of the [...]

by Glen Allport
Exclusive to STR
October 31, 2008
“What the Bail-Out does is saddle the country and all its ‘taxpayers’ with new trillions of debt and makes it such that every ‘taxpayer’, regardless of how wise, cautious and frugal he may be, owes loads of Federal Reserve Notes (money) to the Federal Reserve Banking system. What will [...]

By Cliff Kincaid
October 31, 2008
Joe Biden made headlines by talking about a “generated crisis” for a President Obama. But is the current financial meltdown another “generated crisis?” Considering the problems in the economy, including too much federal debt, too much spending and easy credit, which have been with us for years, why did this crisis [...]

by Butler Shaffer
This originally appeared November 14, 2000.
With the 2000 election behind us – if, indeed, it will ever be behind us – I have now gone 36 years without participating in the voting process. It was not always thus. Upon my graduation from law school, my first full-time job was that of executive secretary [...]

by Tom Engelhardt and Andrew J. Bacevich
Even as the Bush presidency wears down, the Global War on Terror only expands. Perhaps the word should be “metastasizes.” Just this week, the U.S. military, using SOFA-less Iraq as its launching pad, sent four helicopters with U.S. special forces soldiers across the Syrian border in an operation in [...]

If at first you don’t secede…
By John Schwenkler
Whoever wins on Nov. 4, few Americans will harbor any illusions about their national unity. No matter which pairing one chooses—red and blue, Right and Left, coastal elites and flyover salt-of-the-earthers—there is no getting around our status as a country divided, a people set apart from one another [...]

By Greg Evensen
October 31, 2008
After the last week of market disasters and scenes of mobs clamoring for just a glimpse of Barack Hussein Obama, I had all of these thoughts fresh in my mind as I ended my radio show and finally fell asleep last Saturday. My last conscious thoughts were of the dark clouds [...]

By Larry Pratt
October 31, 2008
Thanks to journalist Jerome Corsi, we now know for a fact that Democrat presidential candidate Barak Obama is joined at the hip with Kenya’s Marxist thug Raila Odinga, now the country’s Prime Minister.
Obama campaigned for Odinga in 2006 and had the foreign policy aide in his U.S. Senate office (Mark [...]

Housing Downturn, Weak Economy Sap Revenues, Forcing Public-Safety Reductions
By BOBBY WHITE
OCTOBER 31, 2008
VALLEJO, Calif. — When the economic crisis deepened this fall, this city already was losing scores of police and firefighters because it could no longer afford the rich salaries and benefits it offered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, with crime on [...]

By Patrick J. Buchanan
October 31, 2008
If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.
Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage earners, who pay [...]

Constitutional crisis feared over Obama’s ‘qualifications’
October 30, 2008
WorldNetDaily
The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to help the nation avoid a constitutional crisis by halting Tuesday’s election until Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama documents his eligibility to run for the top office in the nation.

October 29, 2008
AUSTRALIA will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government.
The revelations emerge as US tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy. [...]

Killer touch for market capitalism
By Henry C K Liu
Oct 30, 2008
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asserts that the full resources of the Treasury Department are being used to ensure the success of its US$700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The “full resources of the Treasury Department” commands the full faith and credit of the [...]

Billions of pounds have been wiped off the value of company pensions by the financial crisis
Kathryn Cooper
WORKERS have seen more than £157 billion wiped off the value of their pensions over the past year, with many facing the prospect of working longer to plug the shortfall, a leading consultant warned today.

Russian businesses have begun to refuse credit cards as the global financial crisis worsens.
By Charlotte Bailey
Several Moscow city centre restaurants are now refusing to accept cards in a move not seen since Russia’s last financial crisis almost a decade ago.

By Shobhana Chandra
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy shrank in the third quarter by the most since the 2001 recession as the record two- decade expansion in consumer spending came to an end.
Gross domestic product contracted at a less-than-forecast 0.3 percent annual pace from July to September, according to a Commerce Department report [...]

October 30, 2008
There has been much recent coverage of the rising premiums being paid to purchase physical gold and silver bullion. This has been cited as a consequence of the extreme demand for precious metals and evidence of the growing disconnect between market prices and physical prices.

2008-10-30
Commodity Online
CALIFORNIA: Popular gold and silver coins such as the one-ounce gold and silver American Eagles produced by United states Mint is not available for sale in the market and those who sell do it at a premium of 50 percent or more on spot price, according to Michael Maroney, Vice President, Monex Deposit [...]

The Mogambo Guru
Thursday, 30 October 2008
The most interesting news item recently was found on the cover of the Financial Times newspaper, where we learn that a guy named Lahde “made tens of millions of dollars from betting against the financial and property sectors during [the] past two years”, and he now wanted to thank [...]

By: Bob Chapman
Thursday, 30 October 2008
US MARKETS
Down go consumer confidence and real estate values to all-time lows, but, nevertheless, up goes the Dow undaunted, claiming its second largest point gain ever as the counterintuitive insider trading beat goes on and on and on, ad nauseam. [...]

By Paul Craig Roberts
What explains the paradox of the dollar’s sharp rise in value against other currencies (except the Japanese yen) despite disproportionate US exposure to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? The answer does not lie in improved fundamentals for the US economy or better prospects for the dollar to retain [...]

NGOs Call for Radical Reforms as IMF Offers New Loans
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - Two weeks before U.S. President George W. Bush hosts an economic summit to address the six-week-old financial crisis that has wreaked havoc on the world’s capital and stock markets, a coalition of nearly 600 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from 88 [...]

By Danny Schechter
You thought the housing crisis was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The Mess
Nationwide, two million homes sit vacant. Home sales are at a nine-year low. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says that housing finance has not been this bad since the Depression. We still don’t know the full extent of the colossal [...]

by Sheldon Richman
On June 8, 2008, Sheldon Richman delivered the following speech, “War Is Peace and Other Things the Government Wants You to Believe,” to the second Future of Freedom Foundation conference, “Restoring the Republic,” held in Reston, Virginia.

By Paul Proctor
October 29, 2008
I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way, Americans were persuaded that getting a loan to purchase things they didn’t have money for was a good thing. The definition of “afford” somehow went from being able to pay for it in full at the time of purchase, to [...]

by Anthony Gregory
Franklin Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black has a new article defending the 32nd president. This article, “Where’s FDR When You Need Him?” comes at a time when many are demanding “another New Deal” and a resurgence in Rooseveltian governance. Presumably, he believes FDR needs defending.

by Butler Shaffer
I can recall no time during my years on this planet when a presidential election has had less significance than this one. I know this statement flies in the face of the hyperbolic rhetoric engaged in, by Republocratic party drum-beaters, as they induce you to part company with your innate intelligence by joining [...]

By Eric Rush
October 29, 2008
When my column next appears in this space, the Fresh Prince of Hyde Park (Democrat presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama) will either be president-elect, or he will be schlepping back to Chicago with his tail between his legs.

By Larry Elder
October 30, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wants you – to redistribute your wealth.
In Obama’s highly publicized encounter with Joseph Wurzelbacher – aka “Joe the Plumber” – the candidate said he wanted to use taxpayers’ money to “spread the wealth.” A gutsy local Orlando television anchor interviewed Democratic vice presidential contender Joe Biden:

A MOVE TO THE EXTREME, HARD LEFT
By: John LeBoutillier
Thursday, October 30, 2008
If Barack Obama wins this election, what will the next four years be like in this country?
Obama and the Democratic Super Majority in the Congress, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, will certainly move to the extreme, hard Left:

by Mick P
October 29, 2008
This week an Occasional Letter From The Collection Agency looks at what might be on the horizon as we peer into the macro-economic future. As ever we start with a reminder of the scenario that I have been following over the past 6 years or more:

Such is the severity of the downturn in the global car industry that US manufacturers are now pushing for their own state bailout. Stephen Foley reports from New York
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Why stop at the banks? Now governments around the world are pouring taxpayer money in to bail out loss-making financial institutions, it is [...]

Government to block “controversial” websites with universal national filter
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The Australian government is set to impose Chinese-style Internet censorship by enforcing a universal national filter that will block websites deemed “controversial,” as part of a wider agenda to regulate the Internet according to free speech advocates.

By Patrick A. Heller, Market Update
October 28, 2008
Whether or not you acknowledge past efforts by the U.S. government with other governments, central banks and private trading partners to suppress the gold spot price, events coming to pass in the next four weeks could create overwhelming pressure causing much higher gold prices.

By The Mogambo Guru
Oct 29, 2008
When I come to my senses, I find that I am in some dingy little bar on the other side of town, stinking drunk; and the bartender has grabbed me by the front of my shirt to haul me unceremoniously halfway across the bar, and is rudely in my [...]

By Nigel Morris and Martin Hickman
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
An Icelandic minister launched an extraordinary diplomatic attack on the British Government as she issued a direct plea to MPs to help rebuild shattered relations between the two countries. In a letter seen by The Independent, the Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir condemned Britain’s use of [...]